Space Dogs Hate The Game

Sometimes the editor asks you for a piece, you pitch it, he says ok, only to reject it later. That's the gig, people. That's how the relationship works. As if we were going to get a bunch of commies to like baseball:

Take me out to the Woke Game

In 2021 America, Even Baseball is Political

During the litigation phase of the 2020 presidential election, Republican Governor Brian Kemp insisted that the state’s election was free and fair and declined to support Trump’s legal challenges. As Kemp abandoned Trump the Republican base, which is Deplorable now, has abandoned Kemp. He will almost certainly face a challenger in the GOP primary next year.

But in the aftermath of the 2020 election fiasco, Governor Kemp signed SB-202, an election reform bill that expands voting hours and early voting but also requires voters to show an ID to get an absentee ballot. Trump, the Deplorables and most of the GOP are convinced the Dems flooded the election with fake mail-in-ballots. SB-202 addresses that concern. Joe Biden and the Democrats have compared the new law to Jim Crow, of course. Stacey Abrams, who lost to Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial election and has been claiming massive voter suppression ever since, tweeted that SB-202 ‘Suppresses votes’. Many corporations have publicly decried the bill including Coca Cola and Delta Airlines. Showing the Georgia GOP knows how to play this game, the legislature introduced a bill to revoke Delta’s tax credits.

Major League Baseball went further than mere virtual signaling. Atlanta, Georgia, home to the Braves, was to host the MLB Allstar Game this summer. The midsummer classic as it is called, is an expedition game between baseball’s American and National Leagues. The game is a baseball celebration and showcase for players chosen by the fans. Last week Commissioner Rob Manfred pulled the Allstar Game from Atlanta in protest of SB-202. Manfred’s decision is loaded with historic symbolism and terribly shortsighted. Many fans are voicing their displeasure with Manfred and even boycotting baseball games and merchandise. This is the last thing the game needs. Baseball’s Television ratings decline every year and new ballparks hold between 40-50 thousand at most. It’s been 35 years since a World Series game was played at day, greatly hindering the MLB’s ability to draw new fans. Today baseball is at best America’s third most popular sport after the NFL and NBA.

But once there was a time when baseball was not only America’s most popular sport but America’s most popular entertainment. By 1920 baseball was already widely played in America. The game’s popularity was cemented by New York Yankees’ legend Babe Ruth, the greatest hitter (the man who holds the baseball bat) who hit the most homeruns (a ball hit to the far end of the baseball field and out of play). Ruth was the undisputed ‘homerun king’ and the Yankees built a massive 70,000 seat stadium to hold all the fans who came out to see him play. The ‘house that Ruth built’ was the greatest stadium since the Roman Colosseum and the Yankees the greatest franchise in the entire history of human sporting endeavor (being a New Yorker by birth, this observer has long followed the Yankees and fortunately not the crosstown rival sad-sack New York Mets about whom no more need be said). The baseball season begins in the spring and other sports didn’t even think of starting their own season till autumn. With the season lasting 154 games (it’s 162 games now) baseball was America’s national pastime.

And baseball was segregated. Throughout the first half of the 20th century African American players were banned from Major League Baseball and played in the Negro Leagues. In 1947 the Brooklyn Dodgers, one of the game’s elite franchises, signed 28-year-old African American player Jackie Robinson. The mere act of Robinson stepping onto a Major League baseball diamond was a milestone in the American civil rights movement just as important as Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and The Brown vs Board of Ed decision. Robinson played all season under tremendous pressure, representing not just himself but black ballplayers and the African American community.

This year the Allstar Game was to commemorate another great African American baseball player, Hank Aaron, who passed away this January. “Hammerin’” Hank Aaron played for the Milwaukee, later the Atlanta Braves from the early fifties through to the mid-1970’s. He was probably the greatest African American player of all time and in 1974 he surpassed Babe Ruth’s all-time homerun record. Aaron did so in an American South still riven by racial unrest. The 2021 Allstar Game would have commemorated, not only Aaron breaking the record, but his remarkable career. By pulling the Allstar Game from Atlanta, Manfred essentially cancelled the Hank Aaron celebration and a great African American achievement. Manfred marginalized the African American man who hit more homeruns than Babe Ruth.

It gets worse for Rob Manfred and MLB. Atlanta is a majority black city with a black mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was considered for the Dem’s Vice President slot last year. Manfred moved the Allstar Game to Denver, Colorado, which is 76% white. The state also has voter ID laws similar to the ones in SB-202. So what’s the point of the move? More damningly, Major League Baseball just inked a deal with Tencent, a Chinese streaming service; this at a time when critics are calling for a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Games. Overall, it is estimated that losing the Allstar Game cost Atlanta $100 million and even Stacy Abrams asked Manfred not to take the game away. So under Manfred there will be baseball in Beijing but no Allstar Game in Atlanta. He’ll spend all year defending that decision, and so will Georgia Democrats. Good luck to them in 2022.

Below, your Friday Flag....Comrades: